After some CPU tests, we finally have time to take a look at the 785G platform. Unfortunately some BIOS bugs and Chinese holidays prevented us to post this review earlier.

This is an upgraded 780G with DX10.1 support, which is not important at all, and with the UVD2 stream engine. This will allow the 785G to stream Blu-ray content with picture in picture functionality. We have two boards to check out, the MSI 785GM-E65 and the Elitegroup A785GM-M.

Both boards had their difficulties to match the nominal speed. While we could convince MSI to fix the clock programming, we are not so fortunate with ECS, their board does slightly underclock.

MSI 785GM-E65

Elitegroup A785GM-M

While the MSI board supports 128MB DDR3, Elitegroup thought they can save $0.80 and do overclock the IGP by 200MHz. The downside is, that they also over-voltage the IGP by 0.05V. The latest GPU-z could not handle the Elitegroup board, so we had to use a previous version to get a valid screenshot. The DKA790GX is clocked with 700MHz and doesn't support sideport memory.

MSI 785GM-E65

Elitegroup A785GM-M

MSI DKA790GX

Overclocking MSI 785GM-E65:

As you can expect from MSI overclocking the CPU is a no brainer. But as you can imagine, this board was not designed to allow top notch overclocking. We managed 3.77GHz which is only 0.07GHz shy of what our CPU can do. With 1.4625VCore we achieved a stable overclock.

The IGP is not going very high. Because due to a design problem, IGP voltage and HT link voltage are linked, so increasing one, also increases the other. We increased the IGP to 1.226V which results in over 1.32V for the HT which is quite high. But we ony got a mere 750MHz

Overclocking Elitegroup A785GM-M:

The Elitegroup was able to boot up with even 3.84GHz, but during our Prime95 test, even the core-temperatures exceeded 80°C so we had to abort the test. We used 222MHz reference clock to end up with 3.77GHz at +75mV VCore. The BIOS does feature a CPU Frequency control, but enabling it caused the board to fail booting, regardless of the settings. Also we noticed elevated CPU temperatures, but we are not sure if the board shows correct temperatures. We also noticed a quite high voltage drop of about 0.035V which is atypical for AMD boards.

The IGP is already overclocked to 700MHz, but we still managed to get it to 900MHz with 140mV more voltage for the IGP. The cooler is not really suited for such high clocks, so we advice to use an additional fan.

Undervoltaging:

While the whole CPU frequency is broken with our latest beta-BIOS, Elitegroup is not able to undervoltage any CPU. On the MSI board, undervoltaging works like a charm.

For our benches we used an AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, so the graphics-intense benches would not suffer by CPU limitation that much.

Our benchmarks are quite self-explanatory. Intel i5/i7 CPUs are benched without HT and without Turbo to get a clock by clock comparison. While we would also expect that any AMD board should perform at the same level, which is now true on the i5/i7 boards, there are some small differences. Of course you won't noticed them.

Here it gets quite interesting especially with FarCry2. We were quite sure that the 128MB Sideport memory does have a huge impact on the results and even a 200MHz IGP overclock would not catch it. But the astonishing thing is, that the old DKA790GX which clocks the IGP the same as Elitegroup with 700MHz and doesn't feature any sideport memory does beat the newcomer. We have no explanation for that fact, maybe it has something to do with driver-optimizing. Of course we tested only the IGP boards, so 3DMark03 is running with 1024x768 setting.

While we did believe we will see some new lows on idle-power consumption, MSI has set a new milestone. With about 13W less compared to their old DKA790GX board and also beat Elitegroup by about 11W, this is the first board to manage an idle power of under 50W with the most power-hungry AMD CPU.

Under load of course the AMD CPU is not really great. Please notice we only tested the first three boards with IGP, while all other benches include a HD 4850 graphics-card. So even with a graphics card installed which will draw about 50W in idle, the efficiency on Intel CPUs is unmatched.

The new 785G chipset is just an evolutionary step from the 780G. With the UVD2 it now also features Picture in Picture for Blu-Rays which is especially important for HTPCs.

Conclusion:

Elitegroup A785GM-M:

The Elitegroup board features the best layout and the best backpanel with all the features you can wish for. Sadly, that is ruined by a very weak VRM implementation and a disappointing BIOS. We are in constant mail-contact with Elitegroup and the person on the other end is very helpful and understanding, but that will not help if the BIOS team is unable to fix problems soon. It took them two weeks to fix a bug with the memory timing when set manually. Looking on the website a fixed BIOS is still not available for the end-user. When Elitegroup is serious with the retail-market they need to put much more effort for their customers and have a own team which is seperated from the OEM guys. The board is an all solid capacitor design, but still have cheaper chokes and other design issues, such as sensors not connected, so you have no control for the +3.3V, +5V and +12V rails which is helpful when your system is not running stable. The board is available in Europe for €68.34 while in US you have to pay $89.99 but you get back $18 with mail-in-rebate which will reduce the price to $71.99. As usual we Europeans have to pay more. (That's what we call Liberation Tax. sub.ed.)

MSI 785GM-E65:

MSI can't match the design of the Elitegroup board, having only one PCIe x1 slot and missing the debug led. Also a second eSATA port on the back-panel would not have hurt. In contrast you get a heat-piped cooling system and a much more efficient VRM. While we have tested we got several BIOS upgrades, now even officially unlocking cores. For some unknown reasons this board is not available in Europe, only the downsized E53 version which does neither feature 128MB Sideport memory nor the nice heat-pipe cooling. In US you get the board for $89.99 which is quite competitive. With mail-in-rebate it costs you only $74.99. This deserves our Top Value Award for the most power efficient AMD mainboard so far.